I still use RSS to pull information from the internet to my eyes. It is the most efficient way of gathering information from multiple sources without having to manually dig, and it avoids the brain killing viral balloons from Facebook and the like.

However, there is one endless source of “news” that I am done hearing about daily. Trump. I don’t care to give any of my attention to this national reality show anymore. Enter the Mute Filter.

The news reader I have used since Google reader shut down is Feedly. It has a mute filter that removes all articles from your feed containing key words. I made a test filter for “Trump”, set it to last for 7 days, and then forgot about it.

It filtered 1561 articles in 7 days!

Today, it turned off and my feed went back to garbage. Example A below. (I know Gizmodo is a rag, but I like their tech product features…)

Example A

The Mute Filter is going back on and going to stay that way. Any actual big news related to this trumpster fire I will hear about on NPR or via email or from friends.

My brother Matt asked why there is no useful comparison of the cost of newspaper subscriptions. Some Googling made it clear – this consumer comparison does not exist. So, I took a few minutes to knock one together.

I think the real reason is most people are looking to get a specific paper, and are not shopping around for which paper is most affordable. If you want the WSJ, you want the WSJ, and the cost of USA Today doesn’t factor into it.

I’m not going to keep this updated as the cost seems to shift around depending on the season, which ads you have viewed in the past, and the content of Trump’s last tweet.

The first solar eclipse Mandy and I saw was in October of 2014. That one was a partial eclipse, but nobody seemed to care. We grabbed glasses from the Lawrence Hall of Science, and joined crowds in the Berkeley hills to watch it happen. Shadows went wild, and it was a fun afternoon.

The first lunar eclipse I saw was in College in North Carolina. Since then I have seen a few and even observed one through my telescope, which was a lot of fun.

None of them compared to the totality of the 2017 eclipse. Mandy and I joined the great migration by flying to South Carolina to spend the week with my family in Hilton Head, with the plan to drive up an hour to Charleston to observe the totality.

The Migration

On Monday morning, we loaded up into a rented minivan with my family and our 10-month-old niece, and headed out at 7:30am. It was getting cloudy, so four of us kept an eye on different live cloud maps, all trying to figure out the best spot to go. Citing the lake effect (clouds don’t form as consistently over water in summer months) we aimed for a lake in the middle of the state. Traffic was not as bad as we were expecting, and the drive in took around three hours. This put us in Lexington, SC a few hours before the main event.

The town was packed. It was in the “Path of Totality” and had been preparing. Cafes were giving out eclipse cookies (Oreos and MoonPies) and every law enforcement agent in the county was on duty. We scoped out a few sites, and ended up parking near the lake, and joining thousands of people on the shore as the moon started crossing the sun.

We watched while swimming, and Mandy saw totality start while in the water. The clouds completely dissipated in the 20 minutes before totality, and then it happened. The diamond ring exploded around the moon, and we had a clear view of the sun’s atmosphere streaming out. The crowd cheered, then became silent as our brains tried to cope with what we were seeing. Darkness had fallen instantly, stars were out, and the sun had turned into a ring of fire. Sunset was visible on all sides around the lake and the colors were beautiful.

The totality was only two minutes and 33 seconds long, but it seemed both far longer, and much shorter. I’m still trying to parse out how it affected me, but I felt minuscule on the cosmic scale and part of something massive for humanity. Estimates say that 200 million people watched the eclipse in the US on Monday. On that field thousands of us were struck with awe at the same moment, and shared a powerful experience.

Interesting Data

On the way to the eclipse, people had trickled in over the weekend in small, but constant streams. Once it was over, it was like a pulse bomb was set off in the road infrastructure. Look at the traffic patterns below that follow the eclipse trajectory – some of those red and orange lines stretch for hundreds of miles.

Traffic heading back to the island took six hours. I-95 was slammed with everyone who came up from Florida. When we got back, my brother Matt looked up the effect the eclipse had on solar output in California. Interesting curves here:

Also, people on the path cared much more about the eclipse than those who were far away as Google search trends shows below:

This weekend Mandy and I went down to her college town of Santa Cruz and walked among 5000 pound Sea Elephants. Santa Cruz is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco if you take the freeways for most of it. We did not take the freeways.

Between San Francisco and Santa Cruz runs a section of PCH-1, the Pacific Coast Highway. If you grew up going to east coast beaches and have never been to California you might need some context. The east coast (at least the southern parts) has long gradual slopes out to the beaches. The sand stretches out, and people can ride bikes, walk, and even drive cars along them.

Contrast this to much of Northern California,where the mountains ram up against the ocean, then plummet in 200 foot cliffs directly down into thrashing waves and rocks. It is breathtaking, and leaves you reeling from the power of nature.

PCH-1 skirts the very edge of these cliffs for hundreds of miles all down the Pacific coast, until the cliffs give way to beaches somewhere near Los Angeles. In some sections, the aforementioned power of nature has beaten the road into temporary submission, and covered in it a rock slide or washed out parts underneath it.

Along PCH-1 is a state park called Año Nuevo. It is here that thousands of Sea Elephants beach themselves and make the sand dunes their mating grounds between December and March. We have been meaning to go see them for a few years, but you can only go out to where they are on a docent guided tour that needs a reservation “up to 56 days in advance”.

With the recent rain and storms, we bet people would not show and there would be extra tickets — we were right. Mandy brought rain pants. I did not. By the end of the two hour hike out and back, I had learned: That these things are born weighing 70 pounds, and then gain 230 pounds in 28 days. Their mother’s milk is 55% fat. They can get up to 5000 pounds and live 14-20 years. An alpha male will fight all the other males, then control a harem of up to 40 females. There are multiple harems spread out along Año Nuevo’s sand dunes.

We got to walk in and among them, but not to close to the main groups – just around the outcasts and “bachelors” who were not alpha that year and the young pups.

We saw a female sea elephant start to leave for the season, and then four 5000 pound males chased her into the ocean and get into a massive fight over who had the right to her. It was surreal.

Mandy and I are notoriously bad about sweeping up our floors. Our dog sheds like crazy and this leads to little dustbunnies building up in all of the corners. We had resigned ourselves to living with it until I started seriously looking at Roomba robots.

The newest versions have rubber rollers that do not allow hair to get wrapped up in them, and are perfect for pets. For years I have heard people that hate the robots or love them. I think it depends on your house.

Our place is all one level, with hardwood floors throughout, and is basically perfect for these things.

Since we got it, our floors have been dog-hair free and we don’t even have to think about it. It is scheduled to run while I am at work, and I am sure it keeps our dog entertained.

It never finds its way back to the charging station, but I don’t care. It is inevitably stuck under our bed or couch. I just find it when I get home and put it back, ready to go the next day.

I am starting to feel a problem, exacerbated by the election coverage, and I don’t know the solution…

Unless you live in a state controlled society, you probably get news from self selected sources. TV, Twitter, blogs, Facebook — you choose the channel, source and content. This self selection leads towards a self-enforcing bias. How do you break the cycle?

But – very aware of the self selecting point of view here – I don’t want to spend a lot of time reading material from views I don’t agree with. What I actually want is a diff of the opinions and facts from both sides.

Have you ever sat down to an appetizer plate of good cheese and found that you completely ignored the rest of the room until all the delicious morsels had been disposed of? If so, you might be interested in some of the below:

Everything Niki Achitoff-Gray says in this article I agree with. If you like cheese, pay attention. She does a great run down of the simple things you are probably doing that take away from the enjoyment that is cheese.